[1398] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.13
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Tue Oct 30 20:51:58 1990
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 90 20:51:17 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU's message of Tue, 30 Oct 90 20:43:53 -0500 <9010310143.AA07130@TISIPHONE.MIT.EDU>
From: dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 90 20:43:53 -0500
Meta-gripe: The xrn gripe window is taller than my (RT) screen, so
the buttons at the bottom get cut off.
This is caused by title-bars. However, if your xrn window fits on the
screen, then the gripe window should too, since it's supposed to make
the gripe window the same size as the xrn window (are you saying it
isn't doing this?).
I have a few problems with xrn, which are issues of incompatibility
with rn. With "rn" I could type '=' and get a summary listing.
With xrn, the summary capability seems to have been lost. Without
that feature, I'd have to once again change the way I read news.
(It's a user-interface issue, not a technical one, so I won't go
into detail, but just note that the lack of '=' equivalence means a
significantly more akward interface, in my opinion.)
I'm not sure what you're asking for here. When you go into a
newsgroup, it automatically displays the summary listing in the top
window, the same summary listing as the one which rn displays in
response to '='. It has to enter the newsgroup in order to display
the listing, so if you want '=' to display a listing, you can add
custom key-bindings to your .Xresources to make '=' equivalent to ' '
(or whatever key causes it to enter the current newsgroup).
Personally, I think it would be pointless to make '=' make it show a
summary listing without entering the newsgroup. I don't feel like
going into the implementation details here, but you'll have to take my
word for it when I say that it would be difficult to implement and
give very little advantage over just entering the newsgroup and
displaying the summary in the top window.
Another
problem is that xrn doesn't recognize rn's "-E" option. That's how
I give it a different environment (to override the real env vars)
so I don't have to do stupidity like:
(setenv HOME /mit/dkk/fun ; xrn)
in order to keep the vast number of news dot-files in another
directory.
"Xrn is not rn." Rn is significantly more complicated than xrn, and
does lots of things with environment variables that xrn doesn't do, so
it makes sense for rn to have a -E option. Putting such an option
into xrn is just putting something in a program that can be done
outside of the program. Once again, I don't see the point.
jik
